[1] His novels are set in Hawaii and the plots often concern the difficulties of underprivileged people dealing with societal change.
[4][5] McKinney was a fellow of the Hawai`i Writing Project in 1998 and the 2000 recipient of the Elliot Cades Award for Literature.
[10] When he was a baby his parents divorced; they both remarried and his father moved to the US mainland, to Gaithersburg, Maryland and later Selma, California.
[2] He attended Mid-Pacific Institute in Honolulu for high school and graduated from the University of Hawaiʻi with a B.A.
[11][12] In 2019, McKinney was identified as a co-conspirator in the indictment of former Honolulu deputy prosecutor Katherine Kealoha, a family friend.