"Will you marry me, Rumaine?" Rumaine Mulcair has been proposed to by her schoolteacher love, Charles Pedro. She wants to buy a wedding dress and get on with the matrimonial festivities. But her wedding in Frankville, a hamlet in the Republic of Ontario, may have to take a back seat to a rebellion against the Deviant Recovery Agency, the Republic's police force, which is on the brink of replacing the township's local constables with its own officers. "Stay away DRA," the signs say while Rumaine wants to say, "I do." Can she circumvent an uprising to become a married woman at forty-eight? And is that the only obstacle? The deviant is in the details ... A companion to the previously published, "Shards," "Crescendo" is love and paranoia with a serrated ending to cut your fingers on.