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Choosing books for picky friends can be humbling. There's always one smarty-pants who has read not only the gift book but everything else in the author's oeuvre. Another recipient refuses to consider any story about "some stupid girl." And how about that ingrate who scorns the genre altogether, claiming to have developed more mature tastes? I'm speaking, of course, about buying books for children. Picking crime novels for grown-ups is a breeze. Someone on your list is sure to treasure Robert B. Parker's last novel, SPLIT IMAGE (Putnam, $25.95). And even old dependables like Donna Leon and Dennis Lehane can still be surprising. Ian Rankin departs from his tartan-noir police procedurals to write about a brazen art heist in DOORS OPEN (Reagan Arthur/ Little, Brown, $24.99), while in STILL MIDNIGHT (Reagan Arthur/ Little, Brown, $24.99), Denise Mina begins a new series dealing with class and race hostilities in Glasgow. But this year's tour de force is THE LAST DAYS OF PTOLEMY GREY (Riverhead, $25.95), Walter Mosley's character study of a 91-year-old recluse who becomes an unlikely hero. Even your dullest friends are up for an adventure, or they wouldn't be your friends. So don't hesitate to give them something outside their comfort zone. In THE LOCK ARTIST (Thomas Dunne/Minotaur, $24.99), Steve Hamilton introduces a young man whose talent for picking locks puts him in bondage to the mob. Charlie Huston's SLEEPLESS (Ballantine, $25) is a police procedural about an idealistic cop chasing narcotics traffickers in a futuristic world run by Big Pharma. SO COLD THE RIVER (Little, Brown, $24.99), by Michael Koryta, takes a cinematographer to a pretty valley where the water gives him dreamy visions and a really bad headache. LOVE SONGS FROM A SHALLOW GRAVE (Soho, $25) is Colin Collerill's latest mystery featuring the witty Dr. Siri Paiboun, national coroner of the People's Democratic Republic of Laos. Writers of psychological suspense make it their business to keep readers guessing. Ruth Rendell's PORTOBELLO (Scribner, $26) is a wry homage to the enduring eccentricities of her British countrymen. Rendell never writes the same book twice, and neither does Jesse Kellerman, whose playful cruelty takes a macabre turn in THE EXECUTOR (Putnam, $25.95) when a grad student becomes obsessed with the elderly woman who hires him to read to her. For the gift-giver, there's no greater satisfaction than introducing a friend to a new writer. Belinda Bauer's first novel, BLACKLANDS (Simon & Schuster, $23), takes us into the troubled mind of a 12-year-old who befriends a killer supposedly locked up for life. In A THOUSAND CUTS (Viking, $24.95), an equally bleak first novel by Simon Lelic, a teacher goes berserk, shoots three students and kills himself - for reasons that will floor you. When it comes to the crunch (something for a sullen teenager, hostile neighbor, unbearably saintly mother-in-law), the secret is to make them laugh. Deborah Coonts's WANNA GET LUCKY? (Forge/Tom Doherty, $24.99), set at the "most over-the-top megacasino/resort on the Las Vegas Strip," entrusts the sleuthing to a brainy beauty who sees the lighter side of human folly. The humor is more morbid in A BAD DAY FOR PRETTY (Thomas Dunne/ Minotaur, $24.99), Sophie Littlefield's portrait of a female vigilante who extends a (bloody) helping hand to battered women. Thomas Perry is kinder to the cute if disaster-prone mobsters in his gangland thriller, STRIP (Otto Penzler/ Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $26). And in HOLLYWOOD HILLS (Little, Brown, $26.99), Joseph Wambaugh takes us on a great ride with the folks in blue at the most colorful cop-shop under the sun. To be really bold, give gifts that make people cry. In THE RED DOOR (Morrow/HarperCollins, $24.99), the mother and son who team-write as Charles Todd will tear you up with their image of a wife faithfully waiting for her husband to return from the battlefields of World War I. John Harvey delivers a weeper in FAR CRY (Otto Penzler/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $26), which assigns sensitive detectives to the case of a mother who loses a daughter, remarries and years later loses another daughter possibly to the same killer. Tana French also plucks those heartstrings in FAITHFUL PLACE (Viking, $25.95), when a cop goes back to his old neighborhood to resolve the 22-year-old mystery of his sweetheart's disappearance. If you're really desperate, give friends books that will make them think. Reggie Nadelson takes the political pulse of Harlem after Barack Obama's election, in BLOOD COUNT (Walker, $26), while in BODY WORK (Putnam, $26.95), Sara Paretsky throws fresh fuel on the smoldering issue of whether provocatively erotic art leads to violence against women. The serial rapist killing civilian women on the besieged island of Malta in Mark Mills's wartime thriller, THE INFORMATION OFFICER (Random House, $25), raises alarms about the psychological strains of war. Stuart Neville treats the same subject from a different perspective in COLLUSION (Soho, $25), about a Belfast police detective reliving the Troubles that never seem to end. And in A LILY OF THE FIELD (Atlantic Monthly, $24), John Lawton gives a harrowing account of two musicians whose lives and careers are shattered by the Anschluss. If all this holiday cheer starts to get to you, maybe you should avoid Arnaldur Indridason's HYPOTHERMIA (Thomas Dunne/ Minotaur, $24.99), a bone-chilling meditation on the Icelandic propensity for suicide. What could possibly bring more satisfaction than introducing a friend to a new crime writer?