He had rules for love. His mother didn't.Alex Salterman has a system. Four Rules for love, a few dozen sub-clauses, and a strict professional code from massage school. Date within five years of your own age. Never date a client. Choose the right inputs, and love takes care of itself.Then his girlfriend, a former Israeli army commander, ends things with a roundhouse kick. Alex wakes up handcuffed in the back of a police cruiser, and his mother drives him home, straight back to the house he grew up in.His old bedroom now belongs to Rick: twenty-two, bald, a metal guitarist. And after one ice cube and one pinky finger in the kitchen, it's obvious Rick isn't just the boarder.Alex gives himself two weeks to get Rick out.Plan A goes through Leanne McKay, the babysitter who used to send him to bed before Cheers. She's fifteen years older than Alex, sharper than he remembers, and impossible to fit into any of his Rules.Plan B leaves him "married" to a woman he met minutes earlier at a Honda dealership.Plan C involves a strip club.The third plan works. That's the problem.Everybody has an acceptable age gap, until it's their own. Shredding Bells is a fast, warm comic novel about a man who does the math on everyone, and what happens when he finally meets somebody he can't.For fans of The Rosie Project, Good Material, and This Is Where I Leave You.