Jacqueline Firkins’s THINGS WE PUT IN BOXES, in which a photographer returning to her Connecticut hometown to settle her mother’s estate accidentally rear-ends a casket delivery and agrees to work off the damages at the quirky family-run funeral parlor while attempting to ignore an emerging spark with the mortician, to Emily Freidenrich at Lake Union Publishing, in an exclusive submission, in a two-book deal, for publication in fall 2027, by Laura Bradford at Bradford Literary Agency (world).