WALTER Stackhouse (Patrick Wilson) is a mild-mannered architect in 1960s New York with a successful practice, a dangerously neurotic wife - and a fascination for grisly crimes that serve as source material for the short stories he writes in his spare time. His resentment towards wife Clara (Jessica Biel) has reached the stage where he starts to fantasise about killing her.

Then he reads a newspaper article about a woman who has been murdered at a highway stop - on the same bus route that his wife regularly takes to visit her sick mother.

Enough clues are dropped (intentionally or otherwise) in A Kind of Murder, a psychological thriller based on Patricia Highsmith's 1954 novel The Blunderer, that the suspense is limited and the pay-off predictable. Just about everyone in the cinema can guess what's coming - except the characters on the screen, of course. The film, directed by Andy Goddard and written by Susan Boyd, has all the trappings of a B-movie and not a very good one at that, with none of the fun associated with the genre.