The Trilogy
Zero Margin
A covert network hidden inside thirty-three cafés across thirteen countries. Three novels. One arc. Published by Coby Press.
Author of the Zero Margin Trilogy, a literary espionage series about long-running operatives, civilian-cover networks, and the families who carry the cost of intelligence work that does not end when the operators walk away.
When the network reactivates, the people who built it become targets.
Access the network →Two short visual pieces from the Zero Margin world, held beside the trilogy as an extension of its atmosphere and pace.
Daniel Strade is the author of the Zero Margin Trilogy, a literary espionage series published by Coby Press. The trilogy follows characters who operate in the spaces intelligence services do not formally acknowledge: legacy networks, deniable assets, and the institutional machinery that outlives the policies that built it.
His professional background is in operations and corporate finance. He has spent his career working alongside the kinds of people his fiction takes seriously: operators, technicians, and managers whose work depends on accurate observation rather than ideological conviction. The most useful writing about institutions, in his view, comes from the people responsible for them. From the discomfort of having signed for what they did.
The Zero Margin Trilogy is his first published work. He is at work on a fourth novel.
A covert network hidden inside thirty-three cafés across thirteen countries. Three novels. One arc. Published by Coby Press.
Avi Stern's phone buzzed at 05:47 with the alert that would destroy his family. He remained still in the dark of his Hampstead bedroom, watching the notification pulse on the nightstand. He thought about ignoring it. Avi had spent six years building distance from these calls. Six years of constructing legitimacy through teaching, consulting, and the careful performance of civilian life. Six years pretending he could be just a professor, just a father, just a man who lived in a Victorian house with creaking floorboards and a mortgage he could barely justify.
The phone buzzed again. Insistent. Rachel stirred beside him, her back still turned, the duvet pulled to her shoulders. Through the window, London was dark, the street lamps casting their sodium glow on the wet pavement. It had rained during the night. Avi could hear the occasional hiss of tires on the wet road, early risers heading to work, to airports, and to lives that made sense. He reached for the phone.
The margin between civilization and chaos is thin. It is maintained not by armies or governments, but by individuals who operate in the spaces where official power cannot reach, where deniability is currency and violence is a tool of statecraft that dare not speak its name. These are the people who live between worlds, who belong fully to neither side of the line they walk, and who carry the weight of what must be done in the dark so that others can live safely in the light.
For twenty-three years, Avi Stern lived in that margin. Now, as he read the alert on his phone, October 7th, 2023, Hamas attack, mass casualties, videos already flooding social media, Avi understood that the margin was about to disappear entirely. He sat up in the darkness and began to calculate the cost.
Daniel Strade prefers to let the work speak. For interview requests, foreign rights inquiries, and reader correspondence, the address below is the right one.
Notifications on new releases, foreign editions, and the fourth novel. No promotional traffic. The list is small by design.
Coby Press publishes long-form narrative fiction centered on institutions, systems, and the individuals who operate within them.
Its list focuses on work that treats intelligence, power, and organizational life with structural accuracy and narrative restraint. Titles are developed with an emphasis on continuity, discipline, and the long arc of consequence.
