JOBURG ZEN

Based on true events, Joburg Zen is a searing mystery that threads golf legend Bobby Locke’s enigmatic rise and fall with Johannesburg’s brutal unravelling in post-apartheid South Africa, from bestselling author Sandro Martini.

Alex Lago came back to Joburg to write a book.

He told himself it was about Bobby Locke—the prodigy, the tyrant, the vicar of the fairway whose genius concealed a private life of cruelty, decay, and slow implosion. But cities remember what men persuade themselves they’ve buried, and Joburg always collects its debts because in this city, everyone owes someone something.

As Lago moves through a city split between refrigerated wealth and rotting neighbourhoods, the past begins to bleed out: a violent night thirty years earlier, a death that was never paid for, and an apartheid-era policeman who knows far more than he should.

Research turns into pursuit. Old friendships turn dangerous. Love surfaces where it can no longer save anyone. And the story Lago has been telling himself for decades—the one that kept him safe—begins to fracture at the seams.

From the sun-drenched fairways of the ’50s to the riot-lit streets of the ’90s, Joburg Zen is a literary neo-noir about memory, moral debt, and the harrowing downfall of a family they called white royalty.