JOBURG ZEN

A searing dual-timeline noir that threads four-time Open legend Bobby Locke’s true, enigmatic rise and fall through Johannesburg’s brutal unravelling—an unflinching mystery from bestselling author Sandro Martini.

Alex Lago had been jammy enough to escape Joburg’s secrets, spies, and violence decades ago.

But he can’t resist being drawn back by the lure of his latest project—finding out what really happened to Bobby Locke, the legendary golfer who’d clawed his way out of Joburg’s grime to global stardom. A four-time Open winner so dominant they banned him from the US Tour. A celebrity who’d vanished into obscurity in a cottage named Sandwich after a career-ending accident.

Until a half-century later, when his family would make international headlines for an unspeakable act of obsession.

As Lago peels away the layers of Bobby Locke’s life and the shocking legacy he left behind, the sins of his own past begin to close in on him. Forgotten faces resurface—discarded friends bound by a crime lost to the chaos of post-apartheid South Africa, a former cop chasing closure, and a beautiful woman lost to a fateful decision on a night that shattered everything.

Alex Lago had escaped it all ... until he’d come back.

And now he has become the hunted ...

In Joburg Zen, Martini weaves a sinister true story set against the backdrop of Johannesburg’s turbulent history. From the sun-drenched fairways of the ’50s to the riot-lit streets of the ’90s, this gripping narrative treks through the decay of secrets and dreams buried under the ruins of a captured world.

Joburg isn’t a place as much as a shared hallucination, and Alex Lago is about to discover the past was a hole best left undisturbed because that bastard city on the ridge doesn’t deal much in happy endings.

Joburg Zen is a gripping mystery of golf’s most enigmatic champion and Johannesburg’s brutal self-reckoning—a razor-sharp noir that fuses the city’s savage heart with the harrowing downfall of a family they called white royalty.