In this paper, we explore the malicious meter inspection (MMI) problem in neighborhood area smart grids. By exploiting a binary inspection tree, we propose a Difference-Comparison-based Inspection (DCI) algorithm to quickly target the malicious meters. Different from existing algorithms, the DCI algorithm is designed based on three rules that are derived according to the difference comparison results in each local subtree. An attractive feature of the DCI algorithm is that it manages to skip a large number of nodes on the binary inspection tree and thus accelerates the detection of malicious nodes. Both analysis and simulation results show that DCI outperforms the existing inspection algorithms in terms of inspection speed, regardless of the ratio and permutation of malicious meters.