Jonathan L. Howard is a British writer and game designer, known mainly for his novels about Johannes Cabal the Necromancer. He lives with his wife and daughter near Bristol.
Howard worked as scriptwriter and video game writer since the early 1990s, and wrote the Broken Sword series of games among others. He came to readers' attention with his series of black comedy novels about the necromancer Johannes Cabal.
His most recent works are the Russalka Chronicles', a series of young adult submarine warfare science fiction novels. Set on the ocean planet Russalka, named after the mythical mermaid by its Russian colonists, they follow young civilian submariner Katya Kuriakova as she lives through a time of increasing conflict between the colonists' two main factions and the remnants of a failed Terran invasion. The first novel, Katya's World (2012) was well received by critics, with Publishers Weekly noting its "strong cast and a believable sense of danger", and io9 highlighting that, unusually for young-adult fiction, the novel featured a broad cast of competent adult supporting characters and refrained from giving the protagonist a romantic interest.