Mushrooms love humid conditions and wet soil. Officials with the Minnesota Regional Poison Center say that combination has led to an increased number of calls related to wild mushroom exposure this summer.

They warn would-be foragers that in most cases it’s hard to tell the difference from an edible mushroom and a poisonous one. Some mushroom features that can help identify them in one region of the country may not be applicable in other places.

Here are some safety tips from the MRPC:

• Never pick and eat a wild mushroom unless it has been identified by a specially trained mushroom expert. The only safe mushrooms are those purchased in the grocery store.

• Supervise children while playing in the yard to minimize the chance of accidental ingestions and teach them to to ask before eating something they find outdoors.

• Remember that cooking a poisonous mushroom does not make it safe to eat.

It’s important to know that symptoms from digesting a poisonous mushroom may not appear for several hours or even days. Some include stomach cramps, vomiting, diarrhea and headache. Also, confusion and seizures may occur. Some poisonous mushrooms can lead to organ failure or death.

Specialists can be reached at the Minnesota Regional Poison Center immediately at 1-800-222-1222. The call is free and confidential and available 24/7 for all Minnesotans. Visit mnpoison.org for more tips, educational resources, and downloadable materials.

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Chris Hewitt | (TNS) Star Tribune

There’s a world of trouble in five new thrillers, with locations ranging from rural England to blood-spattered Madrid and deceit-filled China.

We begin our tour with an ending:

“The Comfort of Ghosts,” by Jacqueline Winspear. (Soho Crime/TNS)

The Comfort of Ghosts, Jacqueline Winspear

It’s already been announced so this is not a spoiler: The 18th Maisie Dobbs adventure is also the last. In a foreword, Winspear says she’s done everything she intended with the English psychologist/sleuth, whose first appearance was around the time of World War I and whom Winspear has steered through peace time, another world war, two marriages, widowhood, adopting a daughter, coming into a title and inheriting a pile of dough.

Give the author credit for knowing it was time to step away from the Mary Poppins-esque Maisie, who has become a little too annoyingly perfect, and for giving her creation a worthy send-off. After the end of World War II, Maisie is trying to solve the murder of a wealthy Nazi sympathizer and figure out how to help four children left homeless by the Blitz who happen to have suspicious knowledge of wartime tactics. Fans of the series (I’ve read ’em all) will have to be patient with Winspear’s frequent recaps, which make “Comfort” work as a stand-alone but occasionally bog it down. Fortunately, fans also can speculate about whether Winspear might change her mind after a few years off, since she drops clues that she may not be as done with Maisie as she claims.

“Look in the Mirror,” by Catherine Steadman. (Ballantine Books/TNS)

Look in the Mirror, Catherine Steadman

Both the most surprising and, ultimately, disappointing book on this list is this British Virgin Islands-set puzzler. The first half is buoyed by a difficult-to-pin-down premise: When her father dies, a British professor named Nina discovers he left her a luxurious island getaway, designed by him, that she didn’t know he possessed. The house, and the money it would have taken to build it, re-frame Nina’s idea of her dad. Things get even more baffling when she enters the home. Despite its gleaming, modern design, it seems to be a combination of a haunted house (Bathsheba, the virtual assistant, has shades of “2001: A Space Odyssey”‘s HAL 9000) and a deadly escape room. As long as we are in what-is-going-on-here mode, “Look in the Mirror” is entertaining, but the rushed conclusion is not as satisfying as Steadman’s previous books, including “The Family Game.”

“Shanghai,” by Joseph Kanon. (Simon & Schuster/TNS)

Shanghai, Joseph Kanon

Ever since his debut, “Los Alamos,” Kanon has written about shadowy men on the margins of pivotal moments in 20th-century espionage, whether it’s the development of the atom bomb, intrigue on both sides of the Berlin Wall or, in this case, Japan-occupied China in 1939. Our hero, Daniel Lohr (if that’s his real name), is a Jewish man who flees Germany, headed on a ship to Shanghai, where he’ll end up with a couple of suspect jobs: helping his crooked uncle run a casino and keeping his ear open for gossip items to supply a creepy newspaper columnist. It sounds like a recipe to get shot at, and Daniel does.

He’s also trying to locate the femme fatale he fell for while on board the ship, who does what she has to do to survive in a country where she doesn’t speak the language and women are viewed as second-class citizens. I wish a book called “Shanghai” had more of a sense of place — these characters could be double-crossing each other anywhere — but Kanon has a great ear for noir-ish, hardboiled quips and a gift for believably plunging his characters into the relentless flow of historic skullduggery.

“Black Wolf,” by Juan Gómez-Jurado. (Macmillan Publishers/TNS)

Black Wolf, Juan Gómez-Jurado

You might want to catch up with the first in this trilogy-or-more before cracking “Black Wolf,” which is the middle book. (“The Red Queen” was first and “The White King,” already out in Spain, should be available here next year.) Gómez-Jurado’s crime novels move like crazy between violent gangsters, duplicitous cops and a female criminal mastermind who could be pulling all of their strings. The real lure of the series, though, is a pair of memorable main characters: detective Jon Gutiérrez, who is gay, sardonic, obsessed with his weight and always on the outs with his bosses on the Bilboa police force (feel free to picture architect Frank Gehry’s masterpiece, the Guggenheim art museum in Bilbao, constantly lurking behind him). And Antonia Scott, who is brilliant, haunted by tragedy and increasingly dependent on a mysterious pill she uses to super-charge her already uncanny brain. They’re sent to Madrid to investigate a disappearance but the case broadens to include messes they left behind in “Red Queen.” (The books are the basis of the Amazon Prime series “Reina Roja.”)

“Trust Her,” by Flynn Berry. (Viking/TNS)

Trust Her, Flynn Berry

Tana French may sell more books, but don’t sleep on Berry. Like French, she sets her books in Ireland (and England), but Berry is a more insightful writer. Her debut, “Under the Harrow,” was a twisty thriller that began when a young women went to the country to visit her sister, only to discover her corpse and a mess of secrets. Her new “Trust Her” can be read on its own, but it’s a sequel to previous novel “Northern Spy,” about sisters Tessa and Marian, whose lives are being made miserable by the Irish Republican Army. In “Spy,” Marian joined the IRA and Tessa, who narrates, managed to free her and help her create a new life. Both are living in Dublin, with young kids and new jobs, when the IRA finds them and pulls them back in. “Trust Her” is a page-turner with heart: Berry is great at tender observations such as Tessa’s recollection of bathing her newborn: “I still remember the face on him, when he felt the warm water slipping over him for the first time, his small bowed legs, his wariness, and then his bliss, rotating his head to feel the water moving against it.”

©2024 StarTribune. Visit at startribune.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

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Ahead of the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris, where gymnast Simone Biles is set to compete, the two-part Netflix documentary “Simone Biles Rising” focuses on a pivotal event in her athletic career: Pulling out of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics because of the twisties, a term of art describing the disorientation a gymnast experiences mid-maneuver when they lose their sense of place in the air.

Here’s how her coach Laurent Landi puts it: “She could not sync her body and her mind together to compete. Something broke.” The only way to cure the twisties, he says, is to take time off and try to understand why it’s happening. “And most of the time, it’s unrelated to gymnastics.”

The subtext to all of this is Larry Nassar, the team doctor who was charged with sexually assaulting gymnasts. Biles was among the survivors, and she speculates that a delayed trauma response to her own assault and Nassar’s conviction ultimately impacted her performance in Tokyo. “I didn’t get the proper care before because I just thought I was OK,” she says. “But your mind and your body are actually the first ones to say, ‘Actually, no.’”

The first two parts of the docuseries are open-hearted and a straightforward conversation with Biles about her experience at the 2020 Olympics (which took place in 2021, delayed due to the pandemic) and her life in the years since. Director Katie Walsh will continue to follow Biles in Paris for two forthcoming episodes; Netflix has not said when those will premiere.

Gymnast Simone Biles seen in the documentary “Simone Biles Rising.” (Netflix)

Tom Brady and Michael Strahan’s sports media production company Religion of Sports is one of the producers here, along with the Olympic Channel, which is operated by the International Olympic Committee. That suggests a certain amount of careful curation and image-making is at play and the first 15 minutes or so have the jumpy, frenetic pacing of a teaser. But once it settles down and just lets Biles talk, “Simone Biles Rising” proves to be engrossing. It helps that Biles is extremely likable and comfortable in front of the camera. To its credit, the documentary doesn’t have the pushy approach you typically see in the pre-produced segments that have long been part of NBC’s Olympic coverage.

Will a dedicated Netflix camera crew following Biles at the Paris Games increase the intensity she’s under? Or will it feel indistinguishable from all the other media coverage she’ll be facing? Maybe Walsh & Co. will be a safe space, since they’ve already established a rapport. (Walsh previously worked on the Facebook series “Simone Biles vs. Herself,” which followed her during the last Olympics.) Either way, modern athletes are expected to not only be the best in their sport, but media savvy as well. It’s a lot to shoulder. That said, Biles is an adult. She’s remarkably open. And she’s OK’d this kind of documentary twice now. She knows what’s involved. She’s such an exciting athlete to watch, but often that obscures her human frailties and again and again, she’s making choices that underscore this complexity as part of her public image. She didn’t, for example, stop filming the Facebook series when everything fell apart in Tokyo and the last thing she probably wanted was a camera in her face.

She’s also learned to set boundaries for herself around social media to manage her anxieties, whether limiting comments or her own usage of the apps. Reading one nasty post in the wake of her decision in Tokyo, an ironic smile crosses her face, reflecting on the non-existent expertise of the person passing judgment: “Sitting on your couch, watching me from home. OK.” The subtext is blunt: You try doing anything close to what I’ve accomplished — while risking serious injury — and then we’ll talk.

The documentary doesn’t utter the word “misogynoir,” but a combination of racism and sexism was absolutely driving the harsh responses Biles weathered after pulling out of the Tokyo Games. Dominique Dawes was part of the “Magnificent Seven” 1996 Olympic team and she talks here about what it means to be one of the few Black gymnasts on a team: “My body type was not what (the judges) embraced. My hair wasn’t what they were looking for … I knew that who I was was automatically a deduction.”

Dawes also talks about the extreme expectations placed on elite gymnasts. Her teammate Kerri Strug famously helped the U.S. win gold in 1996 after doing a vault on an injured ankle: “We all were injured, we all were beat down and battered,” Dawes remembers. “She’s standing at the end of the vault runway, visibly in physical pain and emotional pain as well. And her coaches are telling her, ‘You can do it.’ That would be nerve-wracking as an adult (and) these are young teenagers that have given up their whole childhood and there are nearly 40,000 people screaming for her to go because it’s for your country.” Looking back, she says, “That was not right.”

We see a montage of Olympic footage from decades past of gymnasts hurting themselves. One crashes her face into the balance beam after a backflip, another falls on her head after a vault. “In the ’80s and ’90s, our ideas about what was normal within the sport were a bit warped. But there was a deep belief that this was the way to achieve success,” says Dr. Onnie Willis Rogers, a professor of psychology at Northwestern University and a former gymnast who is interviewed here as well.

In some of her sit-down interviews, Biles is wearing a nameplate necklace that reads “Owens” — her married name. She and NFL player Jonathan Owens wed last year, and despite his own athletic career, he might be more famous for a podcast appearance in which he referred to himself as the “catch” in their relationship. The backlash from fans was swift, but Biles brushed it off. Being married means her life isn’t just focused on the gym. That necklace might be nothing more than a piece of jewelry she wears every day. Or it might be a subtle but more pointed message she’s getting across.

At 27, Biles is competing again because she can — she is the most decorated gymnast in history and she’s still a top performer — and also because she wants to go out on her own terms. But she doesn’t appear consumed with the idea that the 2024 Olympics are some kind of redemption story.

Despite the documentary’s title, she doesn’t talk about herself in such self-dramatic terms — of a phoenix rising from the ashes. The series is smart to follow suit, simply allowing her to take us through what was going through her mind both during and after Tokyo, and allowing us into her headspace — and her vulnerabilities — in the lead-up to Paris.

“Simone Biles Rising” — 3 stars (out of 4)

Where to watch: Netflix

Nina Metz is a Tribune critic.

When it comes to veteran quarterback Sam Darnold, respected quarterback guru Jordan Palmer isn’t shy about his biases. They have worked together for much of the past decade, meaning Palmer has seen Darnold go from lightly recruited teenager to college football supernova to high draft pick whose NFL career was seemingly on life support.

All the while, Palmer has never lost his belief in Darnold.

“I’ve been watching him for a while,” Palmer said this spring in a 10-minute film breakdown he posted on his personal YouTube account. “I just don’t see a big difference between what I’ve seen Sam do and what some of the best players in the league are doing. There are also a lot of things where I go, ‘Oh I think Sam is actually better than him at that.’ We just haven’t seen it in a good setting yet.”

That’s precisely why those who have seen Darnold at the peak of his powers in the past wholeheartedly believe he can turn things around with the Vikings. His struggles with the New York Jets and Carolina Panthers don’t even begin to tell the story of how talented Darnold is at his core.

The anecdotes are abundant.

Ask longtime San Clemente High School football coach Jaime Ortiz about Darnold and he’ll reminisce about how ridiculously talented he was as a kid growing up in Southern California.

Ask former USC football coach Clay Helton about Darnold and he’ll rave about his leadership skills before launching into a soliloquy about his otherworldly performance in the Rose Bowl.

Ask current Vikings quarterbacks coach Josh McCown about Darnold and he’ll gush about the friendship they built long ago and how that could help now that they have been reunited in Minnesota.

Now, as Darnold reports for training camp this week at TCO Performance Center in Eagan for his first season with the Vikings, the pieces are in place for him to rewrite the narrative. Though rookie quarterback J.J. McCarthy is waiting in the wings to assume the throne after being selected by the Vikings with the No. 10 pick in the 2024 NFL Draft, Darnold is the starter at the moment, and he doesn’t plan on giving up the job anytime soon.

“I’m excited to see what happens,” Palmer said. “When I look at the list of things that a guy has to have to be great at this position in the league, and then I look at the list of things that Sam can do, those lists look the same to me.”

‘He was going to be something special’

To truly understand Darnold, it’s important to go back to his roots. He grew up in San Clemente, a coastal city located between Los Angeles and San Diego, and while his parents Mike and Chris encouraged him play multiple sports, eventually football started to take precedence.

His arm talent was undeniable from an early age.

“The first time I saw him, he was a 6-year-old kid in our youth camp,” Ortiz said. “You could definitely tell he was going to be something special.”

That proved to be true for Darnold every step of the way.

He was regularly the best player on the field as a freshman in high school regardless of the competition. He made varsity as a sophomore and made an immediate impact despite playing out of position, once catching a slant for a touchdown, then on the very next series intercepting a pass and returning it for a touchdown. He got injured as a junior and his team lost every game without him under center. He returned as a senior, leading San Clemente to a 12-2 record, earning league MVP honors in the process.

There’s a particular game that stands out for Ortiz when thinking back on Darnold’s meteoric rise in the early years. After getting a college commitment from Darnold in the summer to play for Southern Cal, Helton came out to watch him play in the fall. The pressure was on for the matchup between San Clemente and Atascadero.

“You know how sometimes a recruiter comes out and a player tenses up and tries to do too much?” Ortiz said. “Not Sam. He was like 14 for 14 in the first half for close to 300 yards with 4 touchdowns before we ended up taking him out. He balled out that game because that’s what he does.”

‘That’s what a first-round quarterback looks like’

Never mind that former USC head coach Steve Sarkisian had already received a commitment from highly touted quarterback Ricky Town. Nothing was going to stop Helton from taking a look at Darnold.

“I was the offensive coordinator at the time and I asked (Sarkisian) if we could bring him in to evaluate him because I thought he was really special,” Helton said. “He came in and blew all of us away. I remember (Sarkisian) said, ‘That’s what a first-round quarterback looks like.’ We ended up taking a commitment from him, too, and thank goodness we did.”

It wasn’t long after Darnold arrived on campus that he put himself in the conversation to be the starter. Ultimately, the decision came down to experience, and incumbent quarterback Max Browne got the nod. A slow start spurred action, however, and Darnold ended up replacing Browne for a matchup between USC and Utah.

“We thought he was ready and we needed to give him a chance,” Helton said. “He went out there and played brilliantly in a hostile environment, and we lost a heartbreaker.”

In the first start of his collegiate career, Darnold completed 18 of 26 passes for 253 yards, putting USC in position to win the game before Utah scored with 16 seconds left.

“We were 1-3 at that point, and being 1-3 at USC is not very fun,” Helton said. “I remember coming out of that game, though, and being like, ‘Oh, my gosh.’ I was so positive I knew we had something special in Sam. I told the rest of the coaching staff that there wasn’t a game left on the schedule that I didn’t think we could win with him at the helm.”

Sure enough, they ran the table, and Darnold emerged as a household name. He saved his best for last during his breakout season, leading USC to a thrilling 52-49 win over Penn State in the Rose Bowl, completing 33 of 53 passes for 453 yards and 5 touchdowns.

There is a moment from late in that game that still sticks with Helton nearly a decade later. After getting the ball back with 1 minute, 59 seconds left, Helton knew if USC went down and scored a touchdown, he was going to consider going for the win with a 2-point conversion rather than kick the extra point to tie.

“I said, ‘Hey Sam, if we score and it’s late enough, look at me, and I’ll say what we’re going to do,’” Helton recalled. “He goes out and leads us down the field and makes a ridiculous throw for a touchdown. Everybody else is going crazy around him and there’s this 18-year-old kid and the first thing he does is look at me. It blew me away. Just that poise he had.”

That’s what Helton thinks about whenever he’s asked about Darnold. He truly believes that he could still become a star, and he thinks the Vikings could help him reach his full potential.

“I’m so excited to watch him go shock the world,” Helton said. “I really am.”

‘He still has his best football in front of him’

As somebody who tends to keep his cards close to his chest, Vikings head coach Kevin O’Connell couldn’t bluff his way out of the question in the spring. Asked who the starting quarterback was going to be heading into the summer, O’Connell announced that Darnold would be atop the depth chart when training camp rolled around.

“I would say Sam would be the guy I would look to based upon the spring he’s had and really where he’s at in his quarterback journey,” O’Connell said. “He’s been able to come in and really hit the ground running and really kind of take advantage of a competitive situation.”

This type of opportunity has been a long time coming for Darnold.

He was selected by the Jets with the No. 3 pick in the 2018 NFL Draft and immediately got thrown into the fire with little help around him. His confidence took a major hit and he was written off as a bust early in his NFL career. He got a fresh start via a trade to the Panthers and he parlayed that into a contract with the San Francisco 49ers, where he spent last year as the backup.

Now, after signing a 1-year, $10 million contract with the Vikings as a free agent, Darnold is getting what will likely be his final chance.

“We all sometimes have our greatest growth in moments of failure,” O’Connell said. “The level of that failure at this position tends to be magnified because it’s for all to see and wins or losses tend to get put on that player regardless of circumstance around them.”

The Vikings lineup will be by far the most talent Darnold has had around him. All that’s left for him to do is prove himself.

“I’ve always been a fan of Sam from the time he came out,” O’Connell said. “I think he still has his best football out in front of him.”

He’s not alone in that assessment.

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